


Better Men

by likethenight



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-02
Updated: 2012-06-02
Packaged: 2017-11-06 15:06:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/420227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likethenight/pseuds/likethenight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charles has a visitor, in hospital...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Better Men

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sasha_b](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sasha_b/gifts).



> The lovely sasha_b prompted me with this lyric: _Just paint the picture of a perfect place / They got it better than what anyone's told you / They'll be the King of Hearts, and you're the Queen of Spades / Then we'll fight for you like we were your soldiers_ \- and this is what came of it. Well, this and _A Perfect Place_...

You wake suddenly, some time in the night, aware that you're not alone, but puzzlingly unable to fathom who your visitor is, unable to feel them or hear them, and as you come fully awake it all falls into place. Only one person by that description, after all.

There is a soft click as the lamp by your hospital bedside is switched on, though your visitor has not touched the metal switch. You blink a little in the light, and there he is, tall and imposing, that wretched helmet on his head so that you can't hear him, can't reach him, and he's looking at you with such an expression of guilt and pain that it hurts to see it. So you look away, and he sighs.

"I'm sorry, Charles," he says, very softly. "It was not my intention -"

"Maybe not, but it happened anyway," you mutter, petulantly, childishly, you can't help yourself, you're trying to be bitter, trying to hate him, anything to make this easier to come to terms with.

He sighs again. "It was not my intention to hurt you. Never that. It was my fault, but it was still an accident. If that stupid CIA woman hadn't…"

"That 'stupid CIA woman' is my friend," you point out, frostily. "And she was doing the only thing she knew to do; it's not her fault you can deflect bullets with a single gesture. Like it's not your fault one of them hit me, it was pure chance that you deflected it in my direction. But still it hit me, and still here I am."

He's silent for a moment after that. "You're…paralysed?" he ventures, eventually.

"The doctors say I won't be walking again," you grate out, though your voice shakes towards the end. "I…can't feel my legs." Those words again, come up to haunt you, twisting through your dreams, your own voice tight with suppressed panic, _I can't feel my legs, I can't feel my legs_ …

"I'm sorry," he says, but it sounds faintly insincere, the condolences of a distant relative at the funeral of your mother, someone who never knew her, never really cared about what she meant to you.

"So what will you do now?" he asks after a long moment of silence, and you shrug.

"You mean after I'm out of this hospital bed? I'm going to turn my house into an academy. For kids like us. Like those kids who stood with us on that beach." You're not going to give up trying to bring him back to your side, not going to stop reminding him that you were a team. "I'm going to give them a safe place to live, and I'm going to teach them to control and use their powers."

"Like you did with me? Training up your little army?" His tone is dismissive, but still you think you hear a tiny note of wistfulness, of nostalgia for the way it was, so briefly, when you helped him unlock his powers.

"I don't want an army, Erik!" you snap, stung into reacting more than you wanted to. "I want a peaceful society, where all these kids have the chance to live without fear alongside their fellow humans."

"There's no such thing, and you know it. There never will be, because men follow orders, they hate and they fear, and they kill all who stand in their way. I told you, Charles, peace was never an option."

"Peace is _always_ an option! We just have to educate, to explain, to -"

"They're afraid of us, Charles. They're afraid, and rightly so. We will not have peace from them until we've destroyed them, until this world belongs to us entirely." He is pacing back and forth between your bed and the window, and you want almost nothing else in the world more than for him to stop. Almost.

"And you'll be their king, will you? Will you ask them to die for you? We still have the chance to be the better men."

"And I still say, we already _are_ the better men," Erik spits out, but you shake your head, cutting him off.

"Better in what, Erik? More powerful, perhaps, but does that really mean 'better'? I mean, that we have it in us to be _better than them_ : forgiving where they are hostile, accepting where they would exclude us, nobler than them. They must respond to that. If we show them our power and say, look, we will use this to help you, they must-"

"They must nothing. You know how people react to displays of power. With fear, and hatred. They will take your arrogance for what it is, Charles, and they will say, no, thank you, we are doing fine as we are. Did you not see them, in Cuba? We saved their sorry arses and all they could do was to shell us out of existence. Or try to." Erik allows himself a sardonic twist of his lips, and you shake your head, he's misunderstanding you again.

"That's not what I mean. And am I arrogant to say that we're better than them? No more than you are for saying the same thing. I just don't mean the same as you."

"Turn the other cheek, will you? You can only do that so many times before you have no cheeks left." He turns, paces to the window and back again, and you can feel the frustration buzzing out of him, though he hasn't taken the helmet off yet and you can't actually read his thoughts.

"Do you mistrust me so much?" you find yourself musing, almost whispering, and he snaps back to face you, clearly taken aback.

"Yes," he says after a moment. "You can see everything of me, and draw your own conclusions. Perhaps I prefer to keep myself private."

You close your eyes at that, rather stung; if you'd been anywhere other than flat on your back in a hospital bed, you'd have turned away. "I'm sorry. I didn't intend to intrude. I just…"

"…assumed that I wouldn't mind, and barged on in anyway." You can hear the rueful smile in Erik's voice, and you open your eyes again, confused; you thought he was angry.

You begin another apology but he waves his hand, cutting you off. "That's what you do. So anxious to help, to improve us all. You gave me access to my powers, after all, far more than that…" he pauses, "…that butcher ever did. You set me free, Charles. I can never thank you enough for that."

"Then will you take off that helmet?" you hear yourself asking, refusing to think about what you might inadvertently have unleashed when you set him free. "I won't read you if you don't want me to, but…" you trail off, not quite sure you can stand to admit it to him, "…I can't bear not hearing you any more."

There, it's done; it's out there. Never mind the fact that you also can't bear the memory of having to see what he'd done, without being able to hear him, that sudden distance between you made all the sharper by the fact that you were there, inside Shaw's mind as Erik forced the coin into his brain, and you couldn't hear him doing it, you couldn't reach him to tell him to stop, all you could do was see, and feel, and scream the screams that Shaw couldn't voice. You're not going to admit to the nightmares you're still having about that.

Erik's face crumples, just a little, a flash of true, pure emotion passing through his eyes for a fleeting moment before he reaches up and very slowly takes the helmet off. "No reading me. Unless you're willing to teach me how to hide my thoughts from you without this thing."

"I don't know if that's possible. If you're not a telepath…I mean, if you are, it's easier to block someone out, but if you're not…I don't know if your mind would even be capable of it."

"So we're all just fair game to you, are we?" he says, beginning to raise the helmet again, and you stretch out your hand towards him, trying to stop him.

"No! Of course not, that's not the way it…" you trail off, suddenly guilty, because of course it is, or it has been, with you, you've just gone striding on in where people don't necessarily want you, like Hank, poor Hank, exposed against his will, you really need to apologise to him for that. "I can choose not to read people," you say, eventually. "I promised Raven I'd never read her, and I never have. I can make you the same promise." Although you don't quite like to, really, given that he's now technically your opponent and it might be vital to know what he's thinking, what he's planning…but then if he thinks you won't, maybe he'll leave that wretched helmet off, and you don't mean it so that you can go sneaking into his mind, you just mean it so that you'll be able to hear him, know that he's out there, instead of the horrible blankness that's been there ever since that awful day on the beach. Besides, your word is your bond. You'd never go back on it, once given.

He lowers the helmet again. "Well, it does give you an unfair advantage," he says after a moment. "But I suppose I do miss having you poking around in there." He gives you a small, rueful smile, and you can't help smiling in return.

"You do hold most of the cards, though," you remind him. "If you don't want me in there, just put the helmet on. If you…don't mind me there, at any time, all you have to do is take it off. I'll know."

He laughs, a short, slightly humourless sound. "Sleeping in it isn't very comfortable."

"There's probably someone out there who can build you something to sleep in that'd keep me out. That Miss Frost ought to know a trick or two, since Shaw had something on that sub that did the same job." You can't quite believe you're giving him ideas as to how to evade you, but at the same time you can't help yourself, it's only fair, and you want him back so badly you can taste it, you'd give him almost anything if only he'd reconsider.

He looks at you oddly, then, and you have the horrible feeling you were just broadcasting; but then, really, who cares if he knows? Your pride isn't particularly dented by letting him know what he's done to you; not physically but psychically, emotionally, perhaps it might help…

"I can't come back, Charles," he says. "I'd be lying to you and to myself. We want different things."

"It doesn't have to-" you begin, but he cuts you off.

"Yes, it does," he says. "I'd be miserable in your world, helping them and getting kicked in the teeth for doing it. And you'd be miserable in mine. You're too good, Charles. There isn't a bone in your body that would happily overthrow those tyrants. You can say they don't understand what they're doing all you want, I've heard that before and I know how dangerous it is. They didn't sleepwalk into exterminating my people. And they'd do the same for us, given half a chance."

You can hear him now, hear and feel the pain inside him, and you're beginning to understand him as you didn't before, beginning to realise why he sees the world the way he does; and it breaks your heart maybe worse than on that beach, when he left you there, injured and broken and lost. That despite everything, the intensity of the bond between you, the strength of your friendship, forged true and fast in only a few weeks, he was never on the same side as you, merely fighting alongside you for an entirely different end. You close your eyes for a moment, overwhelmed and frustrated and filled with a sadness you can't even begin to describe; a tear escapes, maybe two, and you feel the bed shifting under his weight as he comes to sit beside you, as he leans over to rest his forehead against yours.

"I'm sorry, Charles," he whispers. "I can't be who you want me to be. Maybe if we'd met before…before the camps, I'd have been different. Maybe I'd have been as optimistic as you. But I've seen what they do to those they fear. I've seen it, and felt it, and I tell you, never again."

You don't speak; you can't, your throat is tight and you know that if you make a sound you'll break and cry like a child. You blink again, and another tear escapes, and then you feel his lips against yours and you kiss him back, hungrily, desperately, hopelessly, anything other than giving in to the emptiness inside you. If this is all it can be, then so be it. You'll have to get used to it. You'll have to learn to stop the pain. You let him see it then, let him hear it, let him feel everything he's done to you, everything you've done to each other, but you also let him know that you're stronger than that. You will not let it break you, and you will not let it shake you from your course. He is welcome back any time, but you know that the two of you are more likely to be facing off across battlefields from now on.

And if it's salt that you taste, on his lips and his tongue, then you're not the only one whose sorrow is too great to be kept inside; and that, at least, is a small, fleeting comfort.


End file.
